Saturday, April 13, 2013

Whence came this Animus?

The animus is interesting, a sort of movement towards complete
cultural legitimacy for video games, an industry that started very much like
the movies as a product to sell to kids and impressionable young adults. Movies
have achieved cultural legitimacy. Everyone watches movies and there’s movies
out there for everyone to watch. Indie films are a big deal and you can’t swing
a dead cat without hitting an aspiring filmmaker or even just a crew member. Music
has achieved cultural legitimacy. Everyone, no matter what gender, how rich or
poor, big or small from every culture in the world enjoys some kind of music.

The animus is thus to achieve such widespread appeal and
legitimacy that games becomes a thing you can proudly and openly talk about
with people around you no matter who they are, since the assumption here is
that 1. You can’t already do this and 2. That you can do this with all
culturally legitimate things. It’s part of a larger psychographic for “nerds”
and the persecution complex therein that I don’t really want to talk about
right now.

What I do want to talk about is another discussion that’s
recurred lately, the discussion of “what is a game” or usually more accusatorially,
“X is not a game.” I’m not going to attempt a genealogy of this one either,
(gee I’m telling you what I won’t do a lot. Sorry.) but lately the discussion
has cascaded out of the last gdc which was amazing and awesome and really
hopeful for a different sort of future in the field of games.

I’m gonna back up again because I want to talk about something that’s a little
more relevant to anthropology or really just my life in general. Some basic
concepts: academia is a culture. It’s a culture that values argument and
knowledge and debate and that sort of thing, but it’s also a culture with
specific rules for interaction and accepted norms of behavior. One of the
facets of a culture that is so focused on ideas and theory and argumentation is
that the culture needs a steady supply of debate. Problem is, a lot of the
bigger debates in academia are usually pretty simple. Moral absolutism(or
objectivism) versus moral relativism. Materialism versus cultural determinism
(sometimes also versus whatever present permutation of sociobiology exists).
Determinism vs non-determinism. These are all “big” ideas that can be fairly easily
summarized and generally have apparent flaws that the schisms divide upon. What
drives academia and fuels its own form of cultural legitimacy is this idea of “nuance.”
Nuance is being able to say to someone who fundamentally disagrees with your position
“I don’t think you understand my position” or “my position is more complicated
than that” as a form of dancing around strict disagreement. This is but one of
the many tools of obfuscation that academia uses. Another tool is the requisite
education required to get involved in these discussions, a tripartite thing
consisting of the wealth to pursue the education, the bureaucratic degree
requirements, and the implicit education needed to read the sorts of arguments
that occur.

I digress (I happen to like big words and tend towards the
expectation that everyone reading this can access google or even better access
me if they don’t understand something I’ve written)

Koster’s argument letter thing up there is an example of
nuancing the debate. Though he’s using the same sort of language that “x is/is
not a game” debates trend towards, he’s outwardly acknowledging that his
position is untenable and finding ways around it so that he can express his
dissatisfaction with the games he feels transgress game norms in a way that
doesn’t tack to a lost argument. It’s silly as heck but boy howdy it’s pretty
much how academia functions. In many ways it’s how the internet functions as
well, as discussion forums were both populated from the start by academics and
feature similar discursive landscapes. The major difference being that the
internet has much lower barriers to entry so the “undergrad” level of discourse
happens again and again as new people get involved.

I’m still digressing. Koster isn’t stupid nor is he
particularly unaware of this issue. He took a lot of pains in that article to
try and acknowledge that the language he’s using is and has been used as a tool
of exclusion. Unfortunately he performs little better, putting his foot in
mouth and slowly inching it in there with weasel words and constant
protestations. The games/not games debate is intensely political, hugely because
the games side tend to be the financially and socially successful and the not
games side tend to be personal and transgressive and radical.

Making any statement whatsoever on what is or isn’t a game
is a political statement. I could and would argue many of the popular
interactive experiences offered by EA and their ilk are not really games
because of how small the space for interaction is. In shooters, for example,
the interaction is limited to shooting other players and devising more
efficient ways to shoot and occasionally avoid being shot. RTS games on the
other hand have more clearly defined space for differential strategies. Even
then the strategies tend to boil down to clicks per second. Here saying that I’m
using a definitional statement that insists that games with greater strategies
or interactive options are more game than other games. It’s silly and based
entirely on personal bias.

This personal bias is what makes those statements so
political. You’re declaring a personal belief about the world that is not
something that is empirically provable. A large part of this has to do with the
fact that at certain level (computer) games are not actually independent things
but a kind of computer program. Games in a more physical sense have a lot to do
with the cultural constructs of play and leisure. What constitutes play and
leisure is of course a culturally discursive thing and so what constitutes a
game is a discursive thing. What that means is that games are what people think
are games, so when some people think some things are not games and other people
think things are games, political conflict occurs.

I digress. Games criticism is like all criticism in that it
has to come from a certain point of view. I might criticize the government for
being murderous warmongerers or I might criticize it for being a tax and spend
bloated bureaucracy or I might do both, but those criticisms come from different
assumptions about the world. When we criticize games we’re also making
political statements because our criticism has to come from a point of view. If
we think a game loses merit because it doesn’t adhere to whatever concept we
have of a “formal” game, then we’re making a statement about what we think
games ought to be. Simultaneously if we criticize a criticism of a game for
being oppressively motivated to rehabilitate deviancy instead of… anything else
we’re making another statement about what we think games ought to be.

This is all pretty much taken for granted stuff (though
obviously not taken for granted enough if this discussion still comes up and no
one begs any of the questions) and I wonder how much of it is due to me being
sleepy right now, but there’s more story to go. Robert Yang addressed the
letter Koster wrote with a letter to the letter (which I think is a totally
schway move and I’m totally stealing it for something in the future) that did a
great job of taking apart the language and still remaining respectful of the
author. It’s an important step and I’m glad someone did it, since in the middle
of discussions about oppression and privilege and various social constructs it’s
really really easy to lose track of the people involved. Especially over the
internet which reduces all of a person’s being into chunks of text and a few
pictures. I don’t think Koster was trying to be mean. The opposite, in fact I
think he was trying to express a conflicted feeling as nicely as possible. I
don’t even think that he intentionally did any of the bad things I said about
nuancing up there. What I do think is that Koster is going through a certain
stage in belief that many people do, where you’re forced to confront your
beliefs with the knowledge that it’s unsustainable but the emotional conviction
that you’re correct.

One of the more consistent things I’ve said over the years
is that each and every belief, each culture, each individual ego has to believe
on some level that it is genuinely better than any of the alternatives. It
needs this drive in order to continue existing and differentiate itself from an
environment with conflicting ideas. This assumption of primacy is what both
sustains “traditional” cultural ideas and causes the inevitable conflict those
ideas have with changing social and physical environments. What Koster is going
through emotionally is a sort of cry for help by the “formalist” idea of games
that he harbors and the last step in eventually acquiescing to the changing
landscape (or possibly forevermore being a concern troll for emotional reasons,
who knows).

But back to the supposed premise of whatever rambly nonsense
I’ve got here so far. The animus towards cultural legitimacy. The construction
of the nerd began sometime in the 80s, though it probably existed well before
then as a more generalized “effeminate man” or “coward.” In the 80s though, we
learned some big primary facts about the nerd. He is a dude. He is a white dude,
and a straight white dude. His parents have the money to support his expensive
and stupid hobbies, which are usually centered in some fantasy or other. He
needs this fantasy because he is physically frail and/or somehow slightly disabled.
Usually glasses. Bullies pick on him. Bullies always pick on him all the time.
He is socially inept and incapable of obtaining a girlfriend through the
typical ways. Overall the nerd is a collection of disadvantages that renders
him an outcast to society. In fact he pretty much has every disadvantage a
straight white man could have. But by gum he’s still a straight white man, so
he ends up raised with the awareness that he can speak out about these things
and that society will generally listen because nerds build our computers and
things and society at large is pretty reverent of straight white dudes
regardless of how “cool” they are.

So bam, recipe for a persecution complex. Society isn’t
living up to its bargain. This attitude spreads towards nerd hobbies. If only
my family would see how awesome the anime I’m obsessed with is they’d
understand and finally treat me with the respect I deserve. If only those bozos
at the school and in congress knew how I’m gaining hand-eye coordination skills
and learning all about history by spending all my time playing assassin’s
creed.

I want to be clear, though. The sort of people I’ve been
linking and talking about, indie devs and generally odd ducks, all have generally
more personal reasons for wanting games to achieve cultural legitimacy. And
that is also why they’re succeeding where decades of nerds have failed, since
they’re genuinely interested in solving the problem, not just in assuaging their
insecurities. So they recognize issues that society at large have with gaming
and are actively promoting or working to change those problems and forge a
newer and wider concept of what games are and what they could be so they can
also forge a new concept of what a gamer is. These elements are ironically
often in conflict with each other, since the concern of straight white nerds is
to make life better for straight white nerds and not actually promote an
artistic medium. Admitting different races/genders/creeds into gaming would
erode the social environment and challenge the primacy of straight white nerds.
Net good, if you ask me.